Posts filed under ‘events’

Ignite Seattle went off without any train wrecks. People have even had nice things to say about my presentation. Two of the other talks complemented mine really well.

Monica Guzman of the Seattle PI talked about the impact you can have commenting on newspaper articles. She also mentioned the depressing effect of trolls and other forum critters that ruin it for everyone. In fact we both had nearly identical slides containing the Fremont Troll.

Ramez Naam presented a manifesto for bottom up organization. He had some mindblowing and revolutionary ideas on how companies should be organized that I wouldn’t dare to try to summarize. His killer line (paraphrased): “Why are our capitalist corporations run like communist regimes?” He’s apparantly preparing a book on the topic that I can’t wait to read.

Ryan McMinn and Vj Vijai won the prize for hilarity. They spoke on psuedoscientific dating techniques and using NLP techniques in interviews respectively. I’m really jealous of people of people who can be as funny as these guys while talking about (relatively) serious things. They got more laughs in their first slide then I got in my whole presentation. Expect to see the videos of their talks make the front page of your favorite user moderated forums soon.

I’ll revisit all these once the videos are up. Until then you can console yourself with videos from previous Ignite Seattle events .

I’ll be speaking at Ignite Seattle tonight. I’ll be discussing a lot of the ideas you see here on this blog. Online debate, why it sucks, what can be done about it etc. Ignite is at the Capitol Hill Arts Center at 8pm tonight. If it goes well there will probably be a video.